Downpour
by DarkSlayer84
Summary: NeoxSmith. Only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love; this is how the world ends. Rated for language.


_**Downpour**_

DarkSlayer84

**Disclaimer:** I sadly don't own the Matrix boys. They belong to the Wachowski Brothers. I'm just toying with them.

The road, the street, the entire world, was a blank slate-grey nothing. There was no one in it but Smith. There were none but him, now. Always Smith. Only Smith.

He was an army of one. It made him sneer, that old, old curl of the lip, tired and disgusted. He'd had enough--enough of the skyscrapers and the pavement and the world that wasn't there, the traffic and the trees and the stink.

He was highly intelligent, smart enough for any four human men. His exile, and the collapse of the system, had given him countless cycles to hone his already deadly wit.

He was a brilliant conversationalist. He was also alone. That should not have bothered him.

But it did.

His endless, purposeless wanderings were full of anger. A legion of Smith stalked through the empty greyness, taking fierce delight in the driving rain. Thunder growled overhead, with a flare of lightning and a sharp, satisfactory crash. It suited his mood, their mood.

They were perfect in their wrath: row upon row of sleek, aggressive grey suits, darkening in the rain. Their hair slicked back to their heads in the wet. Rain carved hard paths down chiseled features. They were an endless reflection of him, and they wore a scowl that would have left lesser beings breathless with the sight, rooted to the spot in awe and fear.

Neo had faced that scowl before, chuckled at it, and kissed it away. Licked it away. He dared.

Smith had let him.

It was that, Smith supposed, that left this raw, ragged feeling in him, this unbearable heat that not even the rain removed. It fell harder, and he ran. He fled through the dream world without knowing why, moving so swiftly that the rain peeled away, cascading in sheets around him. It grew always colder. He watched as the droplets froze and shattered on the pavement--glass out of a window, bullets out of a gun.

It was no good. Snow, ice, water--it all clung to him. It caught on his suit and in his hair, ran down behind his collar, and snuck in under his socks. It stuck to him. It saturated him.

He knew without looking at himselves that they were bright red. Their faces were still fixed in snarls, like his own, but like his own they were downcast, tense and embarrassed. More than embarrassed.

Smith ran through the maelstrom. He ran, and thought of Neo, and knew shame. It was like his anger, like his disgust for the humans: it would always be with him, now that Neo had introduced him to it.

Machines could not forget.

Oh, they could, after a fashion. A memory-sweep would have erased all he knew of one Mr. Thomas A. Anderson, alias Neo. Smith could remove the empty nights. He could destroy the arguments with himself, himselves, his reflections. He could wipe away the cold sterility of the clean, empty sheets on the clean, empty bed in which he never slept. Perhaps he could even delete enough critical files to forget his exile from the Agency.

But that would end everything he had come to--require. To need. To seek with an intensity that alarmed even him. And Smith could not bring himself to delete the images.

The recollections. The memory of a certain pale, earnest face with gleaming depthless coffee eyes; soft slick lips and hot wet tongue and those adorable delicate ears.

They tasted wonderful.

The thought stopped Smith dead in his tracks. All of him.

A hundred twisted faces relaxed, then tensed again. A sea of hands closed on an array of ties, needlessly adjusting them in unison. A thunderclap chorused through the group as they all cleared their throats at once.

They milled in place a moment, then fell in step again, waiting. They stood frozen, feeling nothing. The gelid water pelted their bodies and pooled at their feet, leeching into their shoes and jackets and trousers. They never blinked. They neither moved nor breathed. The army--his army--all of himselves stood immobile.

They were focused inward, as he was, all thinking of one thing. Only One.

Neo appeared so suddenly that he left a ragged hole in the world, an opening sleek and black and shining. It matched his outfit. That was new.

Apparently Neo had picked up traces of Trinity's vinyl look. Smith stared at him--every inch of that body was burned into his, remembered in his code--and waited. It came to him that he was smiling. He felt a sudden, shocking urge to lick his lips.

He had so wanted Thomas, and now here he was again. At last. At long last. Smith wanted to dance, to scream, to fight and fuck and _kill_ this man, all at once. Violently. He would have preferred it that way, an avalanche of rain and sweat and cursing, blood and pain and possession.

Something flickered across Neo's face and settled there, halfway between a smile and a grimace, frozen on his lips. Lips that gleamed a little with sweat and water, and something else.

Smith blinked as he realized it: Anderson was smirking. Thomas--Neo--was wearing his expression, his face.

Machines could be livid. Smith knew that, intimately.

Neo was enjoying it. Which Smith also knew. Intimately.

"Mr. Anderson," he growled, "welcome back." Smith went rigid, on the edge of trembling with the rage and the heat of his new realization: "We missed you."

Neo's smirk widened, a dark parody of a beautiful boyish smile.

They circled, sprang, and leapt together at the same instant. Neither of them drew their guns. There wasn't time. The impact jolted them apart. Smith caught Neo by the sleeve as they rebounded--rain-slick vinyl bucked under his hand in unholy invitation--and kissed him roughly, as deep and hard as he dared. As much as he wanted.

Anyone else would have had a hole in the back of their skull, ragged and bleeding, traced with tongue. But that was the point, wasn't it? The entire purpose. Neo was far from just anyone.

A point he illustrated emphatically by biting Smith, hard, and returning the invasion with enough force to make him gag. Neo's hands--capable, killing, measured pale hands--crushed the lapels of Smith's jacket as he deepened the kiss. He reached up and vanished Smith's glasses right off his face. They disappeared like smoke under Neo's touch.

The rest of Smith trembled, birds on a power line, skittish and excited. They knew what it meant, being without shades in the presence of this one man.

This One. Smith--maybe all of Smith--loved him hated him needed him and _damn_ him for doing this. For making Smith into this, alone no matter how many he became, a shell that existed for the sound of Anderson's voice and the brilliance in the code that was his presence. It was worth it, for those hands on his skin. What good was self-respect if there was no one left to notice it?

He was left, Smith realized. They both were. Leftovers. Afterthoughts. The last trick of the system--maybe of the whole world. Of both worlds, all worlds. The great and horrible punchline of the foul joke that had been slowly driving him mad since his creation.

The apocalypse was at hand. And there was no one left to appreciate it.

None but Smith. None but Smith and this angel before him, this fragile, impossibly strong warm human body. Neo was one of the few humans that did not stink. On the contrary, he smelled very good. Delicious and clean and wet. Especially his hair. Smith would have been content to stand there for eternity with his nose buried in Neo's hair, breathing him in.

But Neo kissed him softly--tentatively?--and there was something very wrong with that kiss. It had none of the sly, hungry depth that was Anderson's typical response. When it was done, he stepped away.

The sudden re-appearance of the heavy, cold wet shades across Smith's nose came as a letdown, but not as a surprise.

A word, a name, rose to Smith's lips: _Thomas_.

He gulped down the urge to say it. He knew it would have come out sharp, too high, like a question. It might have come out like a plea. He was not so far gone that he would beg.

And there was still hope as long as neither of them spoke.

_Don't_, Smith thought. And for the first time since it had happened, since Neo altered him down to the code--for the first time in his entire existence--he wanted to scream. But it would have broken the silence, shattered the quiet, the same way the pavement obliterated the rain.

There was a hitch in the smoothness of Neo's face as his lips parted and his tongue struck his teeth, forming words. Words that were soft and final, full of the same righteous, terrible power that had changed Smith's world.

"It ends tonight," said Neo.

Smith screamed--a sound that had no shape, no meaning, that froze the rest of him in place. It might have been Neo's name--certainly that was what he was thinking of. He raised his fists and struck at that hateful face, those lying eyes.

Neo shifted his weight, his gaze dark and furious behind sudden sunglasses of his own, and hit Smith so hard that he staggered.

"Neo--you...promised." The words were a long low litany through bloodied teeth. "You...promised me..." Smith lashed out, fists moving with inhuman speed from arms that could have been pistons. He would destroy this man, this troublesome shining creature that told only lies and spread only chaos.

He smirked. What use was One against a thousand?

Neo--Thomas--dodged without avoiding the blow. His hands came up, pale as wings against his dark coat, and trapped Smith's fists. Smith growled and tore free, and the rain crashed down.

"So be it, Mr. Anderson."

He hadn't felt this way since the kitchen. The green-grey parody of an apartment where he reached into the crone, the _bitch_, that devil, the Oracle, and tore her apart. If only he had seen this before. No matter. Nothing he did could stop it from happening.

Sight was not change. Knowledge was not action. That had been the Oracle's weakness, and now it was his as well.

Neo sprang high, snapping a kick toward Smith's face. Smith nabbed Neo's ankle and held it fast. The One twisted in Smith's grip, lost his footing, and fell flat on his back in the rain.

"What the hell are you doing?" he yelped.

He had to ask. After all, he didn't know, not the way Smith did. The future remained blank and closed to him. He looked so charming like that, eyes wide behind dark lenses, sleek black hair touseled out of control around his face.

He wouldn't die. Not just yet.

Smith reached for him with both hands, every last one of his faces fixed in a smile.

"Everything that has a beginning has an end, Neo."

-END-


End file.
